The Taste of a Legacy: Rice & Beans

How can making a rice & beans dinner on a Wednesday have anything to do with celebration – especially celebration of steadiness? Hello, it’s been nine months and a day since my last blog post, but I’m back, and doing just fine. 🙂

Seriously, I’m Making Rice & Beans This Evening

The beans have been soaking since yesterday – I was supposed to cook this meal last night, but got home too late. My bosses gave us some of their fresh basil to put in the pressure cooker along with them. Rice & beans is actually one of our go-to dinners, a point of pride for me given my Brazilian background. Alongside the pressure-cooked beans, we’ll have chicken-broth-cooked rice, oven-roasted squash and carrots, and a flank steak.

There’s nothing particularly special about cooking dinner tonight – and yet, that’s what makes it so special. The fact that Pete and I cook dinner most nights is something worth celebrating, because it has taken discipline, coordination, collaboration, and self-love to build the healthy lifestyle we lead together.

In recent months, that lifestyle was somewhat shaken by circumstances both joyous and sorrowful – my sweet grandmother’s passing, for which I rushed home to Brazil to visit my family; the yard is being relandscaped, doubling my sense of loss for not only a family member but the garden Pete and I built that for me was inspired by her; an unfortunate roofing situation recently resolved, but that had been looming over our heads and requiring my comprehension of legal paperwork in order to finalize; and on the brighter side, a fantastic beach trip with Pete’s college buddies, which warranted a lapse in our commitment to health for some late-night frozen pizzas and a handful of shotguns with cans opened by oyster shells on the beach. Through it all, life kept reminding us how full it is, and how my grandmother would have wanted me to keep recognizing that fullness.

This morning is the first time in a while that I worked out before coming into the office for my 9 to 5. Knowing I’ll then be going home to cook us a classic Brazilian meal of rice & beans while my partner works hard into the night on our yard feels like a confirmation of the fact that I’m doing exactly what I should be doing, and am exactly where I should be.

The Losses – Vovó Lilia and our first Home Garden

No woman I know has ever led a family to success as my grandmother has and did. The seventh and youngest child left to care for her mother, wife to a poor Italian once dismissed as “unbecoming,” rebel for nursing her babies in classrooms where women were unwelcome, outspoken woman lawyer against a military dictatorship seeking justice for her wrongfully arrested husband, director of an orphanage, survivor of breast cancer, miscarriage, and violent robbery – and yet, a delicate watercolor artist, philosopher, nurturer, homemaker. Mother of three, grandmother of five (and, informally, mother and grandmother to many, many more).

Her gardens – and my grandfather’s – were for whom I chose to garden, as well. As a child, it did not occur to me how unusual and privileged it was to have had such abundance at hand, much less one carefully and strategically cultivated into every possible corner of an average-sized piece of property in a gated community of the large and urbanized city that is Porto Alegre. With all they had going on, I have no idea how my grandparents successfully achieved everything they’d sought to – careers, family, home-building, adventure, stability – all in one.

So while my heart is utterly broken for my family’s matriarch’s passing, and the timing of our garden’s deconstruction made the heartbreak all the more felt, I also feel an unexpected, reassuring clarity: life is unfolding as it should. When my grandmother gave me her set of watercolor paints to take to the United States and told me, “There you will have the opportunity to live your life as an artist,” she knew her legacy would continue.

And here I am – the only woman of my generation of her grandchildren – artist, gardener, rebel, seeker of justice, homemaker, and cook of rice & beans.

The Gains – Wildflowers and a Parking Pad for Bailey the Bus

Swamp House’s property is being reshaped, and not for naught! The backfill dirt pressing against our basement wall has caused a stair-step horizontal crack indicative of long-term water-weight damage. In fact, after digging out probably four feet worth of dirt from the front of the house, Pete discovered that one of the front corners’ cinderblocks were worn away – threatening to create a whole in the foundational, exterior wall altogether.

But all that dirt has been moved to behind the house, creating what will soon be Bailey the Bus’s permanent parking pad. That’s right, Bailey’s getting an official sleeping spot! Her roof has been raised, rivets riveted, holes welded, dents smoothed, and her shell painted a soft Rosemary Sprig green…

… a perfect compliment to the wild flowers blooming in our side yard and the mushroom-inoculated logs nearby.

What could feel like chaos has instead given way to new space, growth, and possibility. Like I keep saying – we are very fortunate for all the blessings and miracles of life that surrounds us in our day-to-day. Never mind the rest.

Never Mind the Rest

I’m learning not to, I think. Once upon a time, I was once the type of person who woke each day with thoughts of dread, desire for death, resentment towards being alive. I cannot recall who that Andrea is anymore… and I am glad.

The greatest value that that version of myself holds for me now is as proof of how far I’ve come. I no longer feel the need to pump myself with poisons – from alcohol and sugar to brainless stimulus – to avoid facing reality. I no longer feel guilt for the tragedies of the world – I am confident that I am doing my best to better the communities I am a part of. I no longer hold others responsible for my circumstances – nor allow others to drain me of my energy.

Nowadays, my grievances are fleeting, my trials are welcome challenges, my resentments have turned into confusion – why should I harbor these negative sensations in my body or soul? It has become so natural to regularly let go that I often forget I even felt badly in the first place.

Do not misunderstand me – it is a privilege to experience life in this way. Still, if I may have the audacity, I believe most of you around me have similar privilege and access to cultivate lives for yourselves that allows for the same sensation of inner peace. It is not easy, at first, but it begins with choices – small, steady choices, like rice & beans on a Wednesday night.

Trust yourself. You’ll get there.